All Things Gardening
Create a mini meadow in your yard with ornamental grasses and hardy wildflowers
It's time for All Things Gardening with Charlie Nardosi, brought to you by Vermont Victory Greenhouses and Gardener Supply. Hello, Charlie. Hi, Mary. I understand you're just back from a big trip to Montana. What did you see out there and what could we maybe recreate in our own local yards and gardens? Well, as we were hiking out there in Southern Montana, I was just struck by the beautiful plains, the beautiful grasses, and the mix of grasses and wildflowers. And I'm thinking, well, we always talk about planting wildflowers, but what about planting some grasses in with them so it has a more natural feel to it and maybe be a little less work? And, of course, some of these grasses are very hardy. Montana's colder than Vermont, believe it or not, are very hardy grasses. They're tough. They have strong root systems. They go down pretty deep. And, of course, we want to select grasses that are adapted to the Northeast, not to the drier climates and high elevations of Montana. So I did a little research and actually found a great little article from the Ecological Landscape Alliance by Neil Dibble, who used to own Prairie Nursery, and he talked about the best grasses for the Northeast if you want to do this kind of meadow. Some of them are cool season grasses that'll bloom early and then fade out and then some of them are warm season grasses that will last in the summer and into fall. So if you want to start short, you want to grow things like prairie drop seed, which is a beautiful, small, airy kind of little grass to it, and some of the sedges, like the Pennsylvania sedge, which is actually a great lawn alternative too, because it doesn't get very big. We're talking about a foot or so tall for all of these, and oval sedge, which is very adaptable to different light levels and different type of soils. If you want a medium-sized grassland area, the Northern Sea Oats, which we grow, grows three feet tall, a nice one, self-sos readily, then there's one called Purple Love Grass. I love that name, Erangrostis. And that goes two feet tall and grows best on moist soils and it has a very wispy, almost like cotton candy kind of blooms to them. And then, of course, there's a little blue stem, which is a lot of people know that one that only grows three to four feet tall. If you want tall grass kind of thing that goes up five, six, seven feet tall, switch grasses, the panicums are really nice, a big blue stem, the bigger version of little blue stem, and the feathered redgrass, Carl Forrester's Feather redgrass goes five feet tall. The idea then is that once you have your grasses, you want to mix in some of the really tough wildflowers, like Lupin's, Rebecca's, Daisy's, Aster's, Goldenrod, Poppies, even a Sclepius in some of the milkweeds. These are going to grow up and be able to work with those grasses and fit in those areas. And of course, you have to remember though, if you have tall grasses, you don't want to put a lot of short little wildflowers, you're never going to find them. So make sure you have the right size wildflowers for the right size grasses that you have. And then the first couple of years, you're probably going to have to weed that mini-metal that you've created there to take out any other things that are coming in. But after that, once it fills in, it should be self-sustaining, and all you'll really have to do is mow it down probably once a year, late winter, early spring, or actually maybe more towards a late spring, to make sure the trees and shrubs stay out. So maybe try a little prairie in your backyard this year. Here's a question from Christine in Wenuski. Christine writes, "There's poison ivy growing along a chain-link fence that abuts my property. I'm highly allergic, my outdoor cats even managed to spread it to me. Is there a way to get rid of the plant that won't cause me to break out in a rash?" Oh, Christine, don't touch it. Don't even go near it. Hire somebody or get a friend who's knowledgeable about it, and what they're going to have to do, of course, is suit up with gloves, long-sleeve shirts, pants, boots, all that stuff. Dig out the poison ivy, dig it out from the roots, and then wash all those clothes. Don't even go near the house, don't even touch the boots, any of that stuff, because the chemical or ershial will last for months if it gets on any of those materials, so that's my suggestion. Here's the next question from Bev in callus. Bev says, "I'm sending a picture of our grafted ornamental evergreen. It now only has red needles on one half of the tree. The tree's about 20 years old. Do you know what's happening?" Well, that doesn't look good when I looked at the pictures. Thanks for sending those, by the way. It looks like a white pine, and a good section of it is brown needles, and those are not going to come back. It could be root rot from all the water. Pines like a well-drained soil, and if you, especially if you had a clay soil, it might be just too wet for those roots. You can also check for bores. There are bores that go into pine trees, and you'll see little holes all around the stems. Or even woodpeckers. I had a woodpecker attack our willow tree last year. It was just pecking away and causing branches to die back. So I think there's really not a lot to do other than prune out those dead areas in there. Maybe give it a little mulch. Maybe try to aerate the soil a little bit and hope that it kind of bounce back. If you have questions about your trees or gardens or grasses, you can send them to us gardening@fermontpublic.org and listen to this wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks, Charlie. You're welcome, Mary, and I'll be seeing you in the garden. You